Futile vow, like so many others that followed, for when I entered university a few years later, it became essential for me to make my entrance into the Patio de Letras with a burning cigarette in hand. A few meters before passing through the portal, I had already struck the match and lit it. At that time they were Chesterfields, whose sweetish aroma I still remember. One pack would last me two or three days, and in order to buy it I had to deprive myself of other luxuries, for at that time I lived on an allowance. When I didn’t have cigarettes or the money to buy them, I’d steal them from my brother. Whenever I had the chance, I’d slip my hand into the pocket of his jacket hanging on the back of a chair and pull out a smoke. I say this without a touch of shame for he did exactly the same with me. It was a tacit agreement between us and, moreover, proof that reprehensible acts, when they are reciprocal and equivalent, create a status quo and allow for harmonious cohabitation.
When the price went up, Chesterfields vanished from my sphere and were replaced by Incas—black and Peruvian. I can still see the yellow and blue pack with its Inca profile on the front. The tobacco must not have been very good, but it was the cheapest on the market. In some grocery stores, they sold them by the half or quarter pack in tissue-paper cornets. I always carried around an empty pack to hold the cigarettes I bought loose. Even so, Incas were a luxury compared to other cigarettes I smoked at the time, when my need for tobacco increased without similar adjustment to my resources. An uncle in the military would bring me “soldier cigarettes,” held together by string as if they were firecrackers; a repulsive product, they contained pieces of cork, wood splinters, hay, and a few strands of tobacco. But they didn’t cost me anything and could be smoked.
•
I don’t know if tobacco is an inherited vice. Father was a moderate smoker, and he quit smoking promptly after he realized it was causing him harm. I have no memory of him smoking, except one night—I don’t know on what kind of whim, for it had been years since he had given up tobacco—he took a cigarette out of the cigarette case in the living room, cut it in half with a small pair of scissors, and lit one of the halves. After one drag he put it out, declaring it to be horrible. My uncles, on the other hand, were big smokers, and the importance of uncles in the transmission of family habits and modes of behavior is well known. My paternal uncle, George, always had a cigarette hanging from his lips and lit the next one with the one before. When he didn’t have a cigarette in his mouth, he had a pipe. He died of lung cancer. My four maternal uncles were slaves to tobacco their entire lives. The eldest died of tongue cancer, the second of mouth cancer, and the third of a heart attack. The fourth was about to burst from a perforated gastric ulcer, but he recovered and is still standing, and smoking.
From one of those maternal uncles, the eldest, I retain my first and most impressive memory of a passion for tobacco. We were spending the holidays at the Tulpo hacienda in the northern Andes, eight hours on horseback from Santiago de Chuco. Due to bad weather, the muleteer who brought our weekly provisions failed to arrive, and the smokers were left without cigarettes. Uncle Paco spent two or three days pacing desperately under the arcades of the house and constantly climbing up to the mirador to scan the road from Santiago. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer and, despite everybody’s protests (to prevent him from saddling up a horse, we hid the keys to the harness room), he took off on foot toward Santiago in the middle of the night and under a fierce downpour. He appeared the following day after we had finished lunch. Fortunately, he had met up with the muleteer along the road. He entered the dining room soaked, covered in mud, frozen to the bone, but smiling, with a lit cigarette between his fingers.
•
When I entered law school I took an hourly job with a lawyer and therefore had the means to assure my consumption of tobacco. I sent the poor Incas to hell, sentenced them to death like the cruel conquistador that I was, and placed myself at the service of a foreign power. This was when Lucky Strikes were in vogue. That lovely white packet with its red circle was my favorite. It was not only a beautiful physical object but also a status symbol and a promise of pleasure. Thousands of those packets passed through my hands, and in their wisps of smoke are shrouded my last years of law and my first literary exercises.
It is through that red circle I must necessarily venture in order to evoke those long nights of study, when I would greet the dawn in the company of my friends on the day of an exam. Fortunately, a bottle was never wanting, having appeared who knew how, and this gave smoking its complement and studying its counterbalance. Not to mention those parentheses inside of which, forgetting all about codes and briefs, we gave free rein to our dreams of becoming writers. All of that, naturally, swathed in the perfume of our Luckys. Smoking had become woven into almost every activity of my life. I smoked not only while I was studying for an exam but also while I watched a movie, while I played chess, when I approached a beautiful woman, while I walked alone along the esplanade, when I had a problem, when I solved it. Thus, my days were traversed by a train of cigarettes, successively lit and extinguished, each one of which had its own meaning and its own value. Each one of them was precious to me, but some of them stood out from the others due to their sacramental nature, for their presence was indispensable to the performance of a specific act: the first of the day after breakfast, the one I lit after lunch, and the one that sealed the peace and repose after waging the battle of love.
•
Oh, woe is me, poor miserable soul that I am! I thought that my relationship with tobacco was settled and that from then on my life would be spent in the amiable, easy, loyal, and, until then, innocuous company of Lucky. Little did I know that I was going to leave Peru and that awaiting me was a nomadic existence in which cigarettes, their absence or abundance, would mark my days with rewards and disasters.
My journey by ship to Europe was truly a dream for a tobacco connoisseur like me, not only because I could buy in duty-free ports or from bootlegging sailors at rock-bottom prices but also because new vistas provided privileged settings for the act of smoking. Real-life picture postcards, so to speak: smoking while leaning on the rail of an ocean liner watching the flying fish in the Caribbean, or smoking at night in the second-class bar while playing a fierce game of darts with a gang of mafioso passengers. It was beautiful, I have to admit. But when I arrived in Spain, things changed. The scholarship I had been awarded was miserly and, after paying for room, board, and the trolley, I had barely a single peseta left. Goodbye Lucky! I had to get used to a blonde Spanish tobacco, somewhat harsh and caustic, that was called Bisonte, bison, for good reason. Fortunately we were in Iberian lands, and Franco’s pathetic Spain had arranged for life to be less difficult for needy smokers. On every street corner was an old man or an old woman who sold single cigarettes out of baskets. Around the corner from my boardinghouse stood a maimed veteran of the Civil War from whom I would buy one or several cigarettes a day, depending on my available resources. The first time I found myself without any at all, I summoned my courage and approached him to ask for one on credit. “Thought you’d never ask. Go on, take what you want. You’ll pay me when you can.” I was about to kiss the poor old man. It was the only place in the world where I smoked on credit.
•
Writers, for the most part, have been and are great smokers. Though curiously, they haven’t written as many books about the life of cigarettes as they have about gambling, drugs, or alcohol. Where’s the Dostoevsky, the De Quincey, or the Malcolm Lowry of cigarettes? The first literary reference to tobacco that I know of dates back to the seventeenth century and the character in Don Juan, by Molière. The text starts with this sentence: “Whatever Aristotle and the rest of philosophy might say, there is nothing comparable to tobacco . . . He who lives without tobacco, does not deserve to live.” I don’t know if Molière was a smoker—although at that time tobacco was inhaled through the nose or chewed—but that sentence has always seemed deep and prophetic, worthy of adoption as a motto for sm
okers. The great novelists of the nineteenth century—Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy—totally disregarded the problem of tobacco addiction, and not one of their hundreds of characters, as far as I can recall, had anything to do with cigarettes. To find a literary reference to the vice, one must wait for the twentieth century. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann places on the lips of his hero, Hans Castorp, the following words:
I never can understand how anybody can not smoke. . . . When I wake in the morning, I feel glad at the thought of being able to smoke all day, and when I eat, I look forward to smoking afterwards; I might almost say I only eat for the sake of being able to smoke . . . But a day without tobacco would be flat, stale, and unprofitable, as far as I am concerned. If I had to say to myself to-morrow: ‘No smoke to-day’—I believe I shouldn’t find the courage to get up—on my honour, I’d stop in bed.
•
This observation seems quite trenchant and suggests that Thomas Mann must have been a fierce smoker, which did not prevent him from living till the age of eighty. But the only writer who has dealt extensively with the subject of cigarettes, and with unsurpassed incisiveness and humor, is Italo Svevo, who devotes thirty masterful pages to it in his novel, Zeno’s Conscience. After him, I see nothing worth quoting, except for one sentence from the journals of André Gide, who also died in his eighties and still smoking: “Writing for me is an act that complements the pleasure of smoking.”
•
The maimed Spaniard who sold me cigarettes on credit was a saintly man and a heavenly figure of the sort I would never encounter again. I was soon in Paris, where things took a turn for the worse. Not at the beginning, for when I arrived I had the means to adequately maintain my addiction and even enhance it further. The well-stocked French tobacconists allowed me to explore the most refined range of blonde tobaccos from the British, German, and Dutch empires, always with the goal of finding—by applying comparative and reciprocal analyses—the perfect cigarette. As I carried out this line of investigation, however, my resources continued to dwindle, until I had no choice but to make do with ordinary French tobacco. My life turned blue, for blue was the color of packs of Gauloises and Gitanes. Moreover, they were black tobacco, so my fall was doubly ignominious. By then, smoking had permeated every scene of my life, to the extent that none—except sleeping—could take place without its participation. I had reached fanatic and demonic extremes, such as not being able to open a letter without first lighting a cigarette. I often received very important letters, which I would leave on my table for hours and hours until I had acquired the cigarettes that would allow me to tear open the envelope and read it. That letter might have even contained the check that I needed to address the problem of my lack of tobacco. But order could not be overturned: first the cigarette and then the opening of the envelope and the reading of the letter. I had, by then, settled into abject madness and was ripe for the worst concessions and turpitudes.
•
As it happened, the day came when I was no longer able to buy French cigarettes—and, as a result, read my letters—and was obliged to commit the vile act of selling my books. I had only about two hundred, but they were the ones I loved most, the ones I had carried around for years through countries, trains, and boardinghouses, the ones that had survived all the vicissitudes of my vagabond life. I had left umbrellas, shoes, and watches everywhere, but I had never wanted to be separated from those books. Their marked, underlined, and stained pages preserved the tracks of my literary apprenticeship and, in a certain way, my spiritual journey. It was a matter of taking the first step. One day I said to myself: “This Valéry might be worth a carton of American blondes,” though I was wrong, for the bouquiniste who took them paid me barely enough to buy a couple of packs. Then I got rid of my Balzac, which I automatically converted into two packs of Lucky Strikes. My surrealist poets were a disappointment, good for no more than one British Players. A signed Ciro Alegría, in which I had invested an inordinate amount of hope, was accepted only because I threw in Chekov’s plays. I let go of Flaubert little by little, which allowed me to keep smoking those primitive Gauloises for a whole week. But the worst humiliation was when I summoned the courage to sell the last books I had: ten copies of my own book, Featherless Vultures, which a good friend had bravely published in Lima. When the bookseller looked at that coarse tome in Spanish written by an unknown author, he was on the verge of lobbing it at my head. “We don’t take those. Go to Gibert, they buy by the kilo.” And that’s what I did. I returned to my hotel with a pack of Gitanes. Sitting on my bed, I lit a cigarette and stared at my empty bookshelves. My books had literally gone up in smoke.
•
A few days later, I was desperate, hanging around the cafés of the Latin Quarter in search of a cigarette. Summer, cruel summer, had begun. All my friends or acquaintances, no matter how poor, had left the city for the countryside or the beaches in the south—hitchhiking, by bicycle, in any way possible. Paris seemed to be populated by Martians. At nightfall, with not much more in my stomach than a coffee and without a smoke, I slipped into a state of paranoia. Once again I walked down Boulevard Saint-Germain, starting at the Musée de Cluny and heading toward Place de la Concorde. But instead of checking out the tourist-packed outdoor cafés, my eyes were busy sweeping the ground. Who knows! Maybe I would find a fallen bill, a coin. Or a butt. I saw some, but they were crushed and wet, or somebody was walking by at that moment and the little that remained of my dignity prevented me from picking them up. Around midnight, I found myself in Place de la Concorde, at the foot of the obelisk, whose slender outline symbolized to me nothing but a gigantic cigarette. I hesitated, wondering if I should continue my rounds of the main boulevards or return in defeat to my small hotel on Rue de la Harpe. I turned toward Rue Royal, and just outside Maxim’s I saw an elegant gentleman on the sidewalk lighting a cigarette and sending the porter to get him a taxi. Without a moment’s hesitation I approached him and said, in my very best French, “Would you be so kind as to offer me a cigarette?” The gentleman took a step back, horrified, as if some execrable nocturnal monster had erupted into his orderly existence, and, looking to the porter for help, he turned his back on me and disappeared into the taxi that had, by then, arrived.
The blood rushed to my head, and I feared I would collapse. Like a sleepwalker, I retraced my steps, crossed the square, the bridge, and arrived at the banks of the Seine. Leaning against the railing, I looked down into the dark waters of the river and cried copiously and silently, out of rage, out of shame, like a woman, any woman at all. The incident marked me so deeply that it led me to make an irrevocable decision: to never ever again find myself in circumstances of such indigence that I would be obliged to ask a stranger for a cigarette. Never again. From then on, I had to earn my tobacco with the sweat of my brow. I knew I was being put to the test and that better times would come, but in the meantime I pounced like a wolf upon the first job opportunity that came my way, no matter how difficult or contemptible it was; the next day I was standing in line in front of the office of ramassage de vieux journaux and became a collector of newsprint.
It was the first physical labor I had ever undertaken and the most exhausting, but it was also one of the most uplifting, for it allowed me to become acquainted not only with the most hideous parts of Paris but also with the most secret ones of human nature. Each of us was assigned a tricycle and a street, and we had to pedal to our street then go building-to-building, floor-to-floor, and door-to-door asking for donations of old newspapers for “poor students,” until we filled the tricycle and returned to the office, rain or shine, along flat or hilly streets. I became acquainted with luxurious neighborhoods and working-class neighborhoods; I entered palaces and garrets; I came across horrible concierges who threw me out as if I were a beggar, old women who had no newspapers but gave me a franc, bourgeoisie who slammed doors in my face, lonely people who invited me to share their meager grub, randy older maidens whose insinuations were oblique, and enlightened indi
viduals who offered formulas for spiritual salvation.
Be that as it may, in ten or more hours of work, I would manage to collect enough paper to pay for room, board, and my daily ration of cigarettes. These were the most ethical cigarettes I ever smoked, for I acquired them by slogging my guts out, and they were also the most pathetic, for there was nothing more dangerous than lighting and enjoying a smoke while riding downhill on a tricycle filled with three hundred kilos of newspapers.
The job, unfortunately, lasted only a few months. Once again, I was on the rails, though, faithful to my goal of never again begging for cigarettes, I paid for them by working as a concierge in a run-down hotel, a porter at the train station, passing out fliers, hanging posters, and, finally, occasionally cooking at the homes of friends and acquaintances.
It was during this period that I met Panchito and was able, for a stretch, to enjoy the longest cigarettes I had ever seen in my life, thanks to the smallest friend I have ever had. Panchito was a midget and smoked Pall Malls. Maybe calling him a midget is a bit of an exaggeration, for I had the impression that the more I saw of him, the taller he grew. The fact is, I met him under rather melodramatic circumstances when he was as naked as a worm. A friend invited me to cook a meal in his studio, and when I arrived I found the door ajar and a lump under a sheet on the bed. I thought that it was my friend who had fallen asleep, and as a joke I yanked the sheets off him and shouted, “Police!” To my surprise, the person thereby unveiled was a stark naked, hairless, tiny Peruvian half-breed cholo, who leaped up with great agility, then stood there with his horse face and stared at me in terror. When I saw him glance at the Toledo paper knife on the nightstand, it was my turn to be afraid, for no matter how defenseless a naked man may seem, he becomes dangerous when armed with a puncheon. “I’m a friend of Carlos’s!” I cried out, and not a moment too soon. The little man smiled, covered himself with a robe, and held out his hand, just as Carlos was arriving with bags of groceries. Carlos introduced him to me as an old buddy who had spent the night while looking for a hotel. In the meantime, Panchito had pulled two huge suitcases out from under the bed. One was overflowing with very fine items of clothing and the other with bottles of whisky and cartons of a cigarette brand that was unknown in France at that time: Pall Mall. When he handed me the first pack of the first king size that I’d ever seen, I realized that Panchito was considerably less small than I had presumed.
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